MONSTER ANIMATION! FREE ONLINE CARTOONS

THE DUB NIGHTMARE

EXPERIMENTAL ANIMATION & SURREAL SOUNDS

MONSTER ANIMATION! An estranged individual floats amidst telepathic space ways before being enveloped by imagination and eaten by desire. This strange little cartoon was really just an oneric experiment in online animation. I was curious to see if and what I could produce from start to finish in a single day. I have some small and evil thoughts regarding a weekly animated comic strip in 2012, this was a bit of a blind test run. The animation was compiled from 280 miniature ink drawings which took me 6 hours to complete. Unfortunately, as it was my first time using the scanner and software, I ran into a multitude of technical complications and the film didn’t get uploaded for two days afterwards. Nevertheless that was mostly learning curve and with a few minor adjustments to my process I am now confident in producing better animations than this one with a lot less effort.

MAKING THE CARTOON

One of the most pleasing aspects of this animation for me was the raw old –film-style look the work ended up with. There where two primary accidental effects that contributed to strange aesthetic of the cartoon. First of all in my mad rush to beat the self imposed single day deadline I did a haphazard job of registering the animation properly. I left several of the images askew after the scanning process and aligned all the frames all by hand rather than using strict settings.. This primitive approach gave the movie a certain level of jumpiness which, fortunately, added to the strange ambience of the piece. The second accidental effect is the weird flickering that occurs randomly throughout the animation. Although I can’t actually control the flicker I discovered that the effect occurs naturally within my video editing software so they have added an anti-flicker feature which solves the problem instantly. Truth be told I didn’t have the heart to remove the flicker, in combination with the jumpy registration, the overall look seemed to mimic silent era film prints and more importantly the energy exerted in the rapid production of the work is honestly reflected in the gritty appearance. This really excited me creatively as it reminded me a lot of the spontaneous transfer of ideas I used to make on paper as a street performer, only this time the work is animated and online.

THE STRANGE MUSIC

The crazy experimental dub soundtrack came from a live jam session made by my friends on Jan.29 2011. We don’t have a band name but we make all the strange music for the monster animation and perform live during the HEY APATHY! painting performances.